The Last Vacation

The last vacation happened during the summer when it all fell apart—the summer when I had sex with someone else for the first time in ten years, when we thought an open marriage was a good idea and not massively short-sighted, when your drinking reached a fever pitch as your depression held its hand, when I karmically got COVID and sprained my ankle. It was a capstone to a season of chaos and denial, a mess of my own doing. But the last vacation was planned before any of that happened. It would be a 10-day family road trip to the west coast, Seattle then Portland then Seaside. We didn’t have the money but my subconscious knew we also didn’t have the time, so I booked the hotels and bought the City Passes and asked for PTO. I told the kids about all the exciting things we’d do, all the brand new things they’d see and experience, and gripped fiercely to my hope that it would work. 

The last vacation was our only vacation. We’d never taken the kids on a big trip before, and though we didn’t know it then, we wouldn’t again, at least not like this, the four of us. You were resistant at first, saying you couldn’t take time off work in the summer, we shouldn’t spend the money, and in the depths of my heart, that little voice that sometimes whispered things I didn’t want to hear, things I’d ignore, told me your hesitation came from a fear that you wouldn’t be able to drink, or at least not the way you preferred: solitary, hidden, ruminating. But I was insistent—we had to do it now. There was nothing more important than this trip, this last ditch effort. So I planned it all and begged you to come out of your fog of distance and not just agree to go, but have a modicum of enthusiasm about it. It didn’t matter if you came along if you didn’t want to be there.

The last vacation was a silent, unacknowledged agreement between us that this would be the last thing. Our marriage was crumbling before our eyes and we were the ones actively tearing out the bricks. But we would pull it together one last time. We’d pretend we were a family and we would do this for the memory, to create one final lasting picture in our children’s minds of what we had the potential to be. 

In the car on the last vacation, as the kids watched their screens and you drove in silence, I read “The Ethical Slut” and underlined nearly every word, convinced that within its pages I would find something that would save us. I also read a sapphic affair novel by an MFA candidate in the creative writing program I was secretly applying for that glamorized the tantalizing misery of academia and art; a story about a woman who keeps running into her ex-boyfriends, forcing her to examine her future and current relationship through the lens of all the iterations of her past self; a poetry collection that gave me the beguilingly precise lines: I will love and be loved. / Save and be saved / a thousand times. I will let the want into / my body, bless the heat under my skin. / My life, I will not waste it. I will enjoy this life; a pop-psychology book about infidelity in modern day society, a defense of the act of searching for happiness and fulfillment beyond the confines of a marriage, especially a failing, dire, soul-sucking one; and I was unsurprised to find that I resonated with each of these so much more that the one that would supposedly fix us.

On the last vacation, we stayed with our college friends in their tiny bungalow in Seattle. The kids played board games with their “uncle,” who hadn’t seen them since they were babies, and chased their fat cat through the house, its bones shaking as their bare feet slapped against the hardwood. We ate a late dinner of rich Italian food and watched the city lights dance in the bay and carried our tired children back to the house in our sunburned arms. After the kids were in bed, we all stayed up until the early hours of morning getting stoned and talking about the exuberant days of our youth, a decade removed from the harsh reality of our present adulthoods. In the interim, our friends had gotten engaged, bought a bar, built a community in this big strange city, and against all odds, grown up. It was unfathomable to me that so much time had passed and so much had changed. I couldn’t help believing that our life, yours and mine, was the only one who had undergone such a monumental metamorphosis, that while we were getting married and having kids and falling apart, that the rest of the world was on pause, maintaining a tableau we could step back into one day when our life allowed. I suddenly wanted, with an overwhelming ferocity, to go back to the summer when we all met, when we were 23 and fresh out of college and had hardly twenty bucks between us, careless and flailing and fucking free. I wanted to ride our gang of bikes across the city and get drunk at punk shows downtown and sleep on the banks of the river because all that mattered was the moment and we could be entirely, faultlessly selfish. I wanted to be in love the way we were then, when I didn’t have to temper who I was because you loved me to my core, when I didn’t have to fight for your affection or attention or reciprocity, when I felt like you had saved me. I couldn’t fathom that the reckless joy of that time wasn’t just captured in amber until now. But here in Seattle in 2022, you stayed up with our friends when I went inside to go to bed. I curled up next to our kids and cried, because as much as I loved them with an unfathomable strength, that night had reminded me that a swelling part of me wanted nothing more than to go back to a past long since dead.

On the last vacation, we took the kids to the famous Crab Pot on the pier. It was the first time they’d eaten fresh seafood, not something frozen and shipped and defrosted and frozen again, but something that had been swimming that morning. It was a religious experience for them. Butter dripped down between my daughter’s fingers, her cheeks dusted with white flecks of crabmeat, as she told me, “I’ve never been this happy before.” You hated seafood, wouldn’t let me cook it at home, but that day you tolerated it, allowed our kids to feel this simple joy. After lunch, we were scheduled to take a boat tour of the bay. Standing on the dock, as I handed you your ticket, you kept your hands deep in your pockets. “We’re going to be late,” I said with urgency, but you didn’t move to take it. You swallowed and looked at me with eyes not wide with desperation, but dead with defeat, and I knew what you were going to say before you said you were going to sit this one out, go have a beer while we took the tour. I wanted to fight back, argue that you couldn’t ‘sit this one out’ on vacation, but I was still under the spell of our earlier peace, happy with the scraps of one smooth day, believing in the magical facsimile of the last vacation. So the kids and I took the boat tour while you sat at the bar. We bobbed in the water, eating popsicles, pointing out the Frasier house and the sea lions and the stacks of shipping containers like otherworldly Legos, while you spent the afternoon with your one true love. You were waiting there on the pier when we docked, sitting on a bench with your elbows on your knees, and when we walked up to join you, I could see the calm in your eyes, the same deadness that they bore at home, that blurred one day into the next.

On the last vacation I didn’t shit for six days. I ran and ate salad and drank a metric ton of water and took laxatives and massaged my bloated, aching gut but nothing worked until it finally did, at a shitty dinner-theater-brewery where my bowels released themselves in a painful, overwhelming rush of relief. Curled on the cold tile floor, roiling in cramping pain, I wondered why my body held on to the things it did, why my stark refusal bound itself up stubbornly in my organs, hiding and denying instead of exploding. As I came out from the bathroom, I could feel how my skin was blanched and clammy, how I walked in a shaky stumble back to the table, how surely I looked like a wreck. When I sat back down, the kids were both eating calamari and you had ordered another beer. No one asked if I was alright, and it felt selfish that I had expected anyone to.

The last vacation was the first time my kids saw the ocean. They shook and squealed as we walked up the boardwalk, so delirious with excitement they couldn’t contain themselves. I tried to describe to them what the ocean would look like, thinking back to the last time I’d seen the coast, when you and I went to a conference in southern Oregon while I was in grad school. When we watched the sea lions roll on the beach like giant slate-colored croissants, the wind whipping us into a froth, we both seemed like different people, people who were brave and outgoing and ambitious and in love, the kind of people who took selfies because we knew the value of casting a moment in amber. The ocean seemed so big then, so endless. I remember looking out at the horizon and saying to you, “I can’t believe that on the other side of that is Asia.” So I told my children, “It’s the biggest thing you’ll ever see. It goes on forever and there is no end.” We came to the tall, sandy dunes at the edge of the boardwalk and struggled to climb to the top, but when we crested the peak and laid eyes on the enormity of nature before us, the entire world stood still. The wind stopped blowing, the waves froze in place, the tides ceased as their tiny minds blew apart with the beauty of the sea. We stood there like that, awestruck statues, for several moments, until I saw the two small shapes of my children come into my vision, running at full-speed toward the water, screaming ecstatically at the top of their lungs. A sob caught in my throat, overcome as I was with witnessing the purity of their delirious joy, and caught up in the moment I reached for your hand. I swear that I squeezed it and that you squeezed back, but I could be imagining it.

On the last vacation, we went to a mock-Italian pizzeria in Astoria for lunch. You went to the bathroom while I ordered our meal and I bought you a beer. Is this enabling? That small voice whispered before it was swiftly ignored. When you returned, you thanked me, and you smiled, genuine and sweet, and in that moment I thought maybe this wasn’t really the end. Maybe I still loved you. Maybe we could reel back from all we’d been though. Maybe I could learn to live with the drinking. 

On the final day of our last vacation, we smoked cigarettes on a giant blanket in the sand while the kids made sandcastles down the beach and we fantasized about what it would be like to never go back, to leave it all behind and start over here in this little beach town, unattached from all the turmoil of our lives. I looked at the houses along the pier, their siding warped from the ocean’s spray, their big picture windows offering a glimpse into what was surely a fairy tale of a life, and I imagined it being ours. We talked about how I could teach and you could work for the Forest Service and our kids could learn to surf. We crafted an imaginary life and I believed that maybe it wouldn’t follow us—the drinking, the anger, the distance—and we could start over. We could be beach people. We could be strong. We could be not just content, not just exist, but be happy, alive. 

But on every morning and every night of the last vacation, when you thought the kids and I were still asleep, you slipped to drink beers from the back of our minivan in the hotel parking lot, like you were sneaking out to meet a lover. In retrospect, I’ll realize that you weren’t cheating on me in a traditional sense, no lipstick on your collar or illicit, shrouded guilt, but in the fact of your outsized commitment to your dependence, your emotional affair with alcohol. You came back reeking of cigarettes and visibly deadened and that’s how I knew we couldn’t just run away to the beach and pretend.

On the sixteen hour drive home from our last vacation, I spent the miles between eastern Washington and Montana texting a man I met at a work conference a month before. I didn’t delete the messages, didn’t care if you saw, because at this point we’d agreed on our supposed openness. In the bounds of our rules, I’d done nothing wrong, at least nothing that you’d known of. That night, after the rest of us had fallen asleep clammy and reeking of chlorine from the hotel pool, you stayed up and went through my phone and saw the conversation, and the reality of my actions suddenly mattered, suddenly infuriated you. Instead of confronting me, you seethed in silence the rest of the drive. The smile, the warmth, the hints that everything could be okay, they all faded. We entered back into our house and reverted into our normal selves, opposite ends of a spectrum, the wrong sides of magnets repelling each other. You went out to the shop to drink while I hauled everything inside and frantically unpacked, desperate for an equilibrium. We resumed our quiet storm of anger and resentment, back to the silent treatment and the deleted texts and the exhaustive avoidance. I always enter a state of depression when coming home from a trip, but the finality of this time was crushing.

Did we do it? I asked myself. Did we fulfill our purpose by going on the last vacation? Even if it didn’t fix us, could it exist as a perfect—or at least a good enough—moment in time, something our kids can hold onto as a final memory of what our family could be, had been, was?

A year and a half after the last vacation, after you asked for a divorce and I moved out of our home and we signed away our marriage and our family broke apart and I took a new job in a different city and we both fell in love with other people and the cell division of our lives was complete, I was reminiscing with the kids about that vacation. As I recalled all the joy and skirted around the blank space of their dad, my daughter started to cry. “What’s wrong?” I asked. Wiping her eyes, gazing into the darkness out the car window, in her reflection she looked so much like you. “I don’t like thinking about vacation,” she said, “because it was the last thing we did as a family.” 

My heart broke into a million pieces that I will never be able to reassemble. 

Did we give it our best shot? Did we fail?